Saturday, January 19, 2013

Iceland was great.Despite wondering whether we would spend most of the time in darkness
while we were there, it was actually fine – although the sun didn’t rise until
about 10.30am.Reykjavik is a very nice
city and the landscape is really interesting.You probably have to like views and venturing out in the cold (at least
in winter) to really enjoy Iceland, but it is a good place to visit.We are not thinking of going to northern Iceland
at some point.

It was difficult to adapt to going back to work.This was helped by me not being able to find
a pair of shoes to wear for work.Emphasis
on the word “pair”.To the casual
observer they matched, but should anyone have undertaken to scrutinise my
footwear in detail they would have noticed that all was not as it seemed…After a few days, I did finally manage to
find two shoes that did genuinely match.

You might well be aware of the news story at the moment
about horsemeat being an ingredient in Tesco Value burgers.The BBC has run a story called What
is actually in a value burger?That is an almost pointless story.Whilst it explains the rules around levels of meat content, it lists the
ingredients of a value burger as:

Beef, chicken or pork,
depending on the type of burger, mixed with:

Onion and/or onion extract

Fat

Flour or rusk

Dehydrated meat powders

Stabilising chemicals

Source:
Tesco, Asda

Isn’t the reason why this story has come about because a)
horsemeat was not listed as one of the ingredients and b) Tesco seemingly had
no idea that horsemeat was in the burgers.Giving the list of ingredients as recorded on the packet or getting Tesco to say
what the ingredients are does not necessarily answer the question of what is
actually in the burgers.The reason
this story is in the news is that there was a “mystery ingredient” in the
burgers.Surely then this article has
just totally missed the point??